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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
My favorite picture in "Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings," at the Metropolitan Museum, portrays an ox. In black and red chalks, with enhancing traces of other mediums, the work conveys ponderous mass, rippling musculature, bristling hair, and creased and dimpled, somehow palpably warm, skin. Turning its great head to gaze at us with mild, blameless stupidity, this is an ox's ox--likely the pride of one of the farms that Rubens owned outside Antwerp--by history's chief painter's painter. It was executed around 1618, in the early middle of the Flemish master's long, uniformly triumphal career as the leading pictorial decorator, propagandist, and entertainer for a Catholic Europe in the advanced phases of the Counter-Reformation. (As an adroit diplomat for the Spanish Netherlands, fluent in five languages, Rubens worked to reconcile kingdoms riven by religious wars; he also found time to be, among other things, a courtier, a scholar, an architect, a pageant master, a family man, an art collector, and a numismatist.)
What I particularly appreciate about "An Ox" is that it isn't the image of a naked human being. Like many people, I have trouble with Rubens's nudes, especially the female ones: all that smothering flesh, vibrantly alive but with the erotic appeal of...
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